620 reviews liked by Paggi


Staring at the login bonus screen realizing I have not engaged with any "gameplay" from this game for two weeks and have to admit to myself that I'm out. I was in the hospital. I have been sick. I have had no brain. I have been, in retrospect, in the perfect situation to get the most out of this game. It doesn't ask much of me, and I don't have much to give at the moment. A match made in heaven! But my behavior has shown that even when at my lowest, I would rather do literally anything else, and oftentimes nothing, than ever "play" this game again.

For additional context, I am at a hurdle in Chapter 10 that would require level grinding. Except, this game is getting discontinued, so I am awash with resources. "Level grinding" would take literally 2 minutes of me going into a menu and making some numbers go up while some consumables go down. I could make like 5 mistakes investing in the wrong stuff and it wouldn't matter. I could probably max out one dude and solo the story mode of this game. I could probably take 10 minutes to read how the combat system of this game actually works and trivialize it.

But thinking about doing any of that makes me seriously consider with recent experience if I would rather have an IV reinserted in my arm than ever touch this game again. Which is probably the clue I need that it's time to write this out of my system and move the fuck on with life.

I can't help but think of my review of DLC for the original NieR and how language gives substance to vapor in the realm of ideas. Here, NieR Re[in]carnation is NieR: The World of Recycled Vessel, but blown out in every dimension, wrapped around itself, an ouroborus eating the tail of its future child. It is such a profound perversion of gaming as an entity that I sound hyperbolic to accurately describe how incredibly awful it is. Because when a game concept gets a couple things right, there’s a handhold from which the pain of its existence feels novel, fixable. But when something is truly flawed at its core, in every structure of its being, is evil in its conception, execution, and existence, it becomes dreadfully dull.

I've played a couple mobile games now, and apart from some of the Netflix offerings, they've all been evil. But the ways they've been evil have been... mixed? Like they have a touch of humanity in them that got corrupted somehow. Like there could be a version of them that was capable of loving me. But NieR Re[in]carnation hates me in a multipronged attack that is simultaneously so inert I almost didn't recognize it as violence. I wish I had written about all of its follies and injustices when they were fresh, instead of writing about them now, after I've let them wash over me, let myself marinate, let hope turn my anger into indifference. It perfectly matches the pattern of an abuse victim becoming complacent as they learn to be helpless.

NieR Re[in]carnation game has a 3D world. You can walk around in it. It doesn't matter. It's a hallway. Like literally is only a hallway. No gameplay happens there. It has an "auto" button that has your character walk down the hallway by themself. Do you know for how many hours I resisted pressing that button? That I wanted to have some gameplay in my game? I clung so desperately to the hope that there would be a maze, something, anything to justify the existence of this fully realized HD world of hallways and my ability to control my movement in it. But no. Trying to play the game was only a waste of time. Not pressing the auto button was a waste of time.

So, wherefore art thou hallways?

When I wrote about Cats & Soup, I was jolted when I realized that the game world was not the cats, but the menus overlaid on the cats. That the cats were a pretense and the game was the menu. I could buy that the world of the hallways was the pretense of NieR Re[in]carnation, and in a way they are, but then where is the gameplay?

In truth, NieR Re[in]carnation is layers of pretense that never gets to anything.

I have to marvel at the ingeniousness of the triviality. At the same time, this is not the work of a human being. This is the inhuman efficiency of attention hacking only possible by multiple passes within an organization that has memetically learned from other organizations.

Let’s start at the surface. There are hallways. The hallways are a pretense to getting to “levels”. These “levels” have stories in them with light interactivity, very simple visual novel elements. The stories in the levels largely have nothing to do with the world in the hallways. Maybe they converge later than when I stopped playing, but I’m hours in and my god can I not care if I’m wrong. But all of these stories can be skipped, because there is combat. So all the storytelling is set dressing to the combat, itself a pretense.

I have to interject here that the stories are bad. They are vague, simple sketches, nothing more than premises and flavors. But separate from their vapidness, they are bad stories. They are mean, they are droll, they are dour, full of cruelty and irony and melancholy. There is no love. Relationships exist only to exert pain on others. It will say “these people loved each other” only so it can relish in someone’s death and maiming, in the survivor’s suffering and guilt. They are uniformly dreadful in tone, only broken up by the spice of convoluted incomprehensibility when sci-fi and magical elements are introduced. I could spend paragraphs tearing apart each and every one if I was live blogging my experience with them, but thankfully they have been culled from my memory banks. Imagining anyone sees these stories as “rewards”, or worse yet, “incentives”, to engage with this game - I can’t even imagine watching these on youtube without finding the autoplay ads more interesting.

Then we get to the combat, and realize how much the storytelling doesn’t matter, because whatever you fight is abstracted into black blob monsters that have no physical presence or reality to the story of the level. So you might think, ok, this is it. Everything else was a pretense for this combat system - until you see that this game is an autobattler. Combat can happen entirely without your input. In fact, you often get rewards for pressing an attack button ONCE during a battle. Because the game needs artificial incentivisation for you to engage with the only game-like gameplay the game has to offer. Even as it also has a fast forward button, and an auto-battle button. And if you get far enough into the game, you get things called “Skip Tickets”, that let you repeat a battle for experience points / rewards for leveling up your dudes without having to actually experience the battle again at all.

Early on in the game, when I was still in tutorial land, and hadn’t even gotten to the gacha system yet, the tutorial character said “Don’t worry, this game plays just like most others.” I at first thought that phrase was hilariously useless to me, trying out one of these gacha games for the first time - it told me jack shit! But the more I learned about this game, the more that phrase has just borrowed deeper and deeper into the pit of my gut, blossoming into a kind of disgust that would melt any business executive that came into contact with it.

Because the combat system itself is a pretense for - the gacha system. Spin a roulette wheel and get weapons and characters to use in combat. Some are shiny and have big numbers that make combat easier.

Now, I tried this game after the premium store was closed, because the game’s end is imminent. So I have no idea what the monetary value of any of this bullshit would be. Nobody tell me or I might become a terrorist. But. I just have to say.

The gacha pull animation is … kinda lame?

Abstract boxes turn into coffins that slam down and turn into .jpg’s of Ebon Spears and Emerald Bracers and everything about the colors and the environment and the music is just so… without gravitas, without playfulness, without anything that I can imagine incentivizing another pull. I have enough premium currency for like, 10 or more gacha pulls, and separate from the decision paralysis of there being a million events going on the for the game’s end, after my free daily pulls, it’s been such a boring experience that I’ve actively ex’d out of the summoning menu and often logged off of the game because its so dull. I cannot believe this is where the money is supposed to be made.

And that’s when I realized the gacha system itself is only a front for where the true addiction is supposed to lie - the character upgrade menus. You upgrade characters. You upgrade weapons. You upgrade skills. You upgrade teddybears. (That is not a joke.) You upgrade instances of characters. All that take varying amounts of money, experience, currencies, resources, and most importantly, time.

I thought I’d be mad that the gacha system has ridiculously low percentages for getting the good shit. I thought I’d be mad that getting a cool character is only the beginning - that you need to get their low drop rate multiple times to fully upgrade them. And like, yeah, that’s pretty evil, even without considering the compounding evil of charging real world money every time. I don’t want to underserve that. It is morally indefensible. Maybe I’m only less worked up because I have no idea how much any of it used to cost. But I can relate to the time. The insane amount of time that is required to fiddle with all these numbers to get past combat encounters to clear story episodes to walk down more hallways. All journey, no destination, but you’re not traveling with friends, and you’re not going to make any. This is a journey that can only be completed with misplaced investment into a beautifully drawn delusion.

I feel so incredibly dead inside thinking about how there are people who like this game. I read about this game’s existence and thought, “oh neat, I’ll get to play a gacha game without all the gacha elements hanging over the experience, and in the NieR series that I’ve been playing through!” And it had fans, and they loved it, and expressed so much concern for this game’s preservation. How there was so much art, so much story that needed to be preserved for the future. And a part of me really wanted to experience something magical about a shared experience with a piece of art that will never be possible again.

But after trying, sincerely trying, I’m just scared. Because this game fucking hates me. It hates you. It hates everyone. I can’t even tell how personally it hates people, because I don’t know how much it can even conceive of humans as people. It hates me for wanting to find an experience worth having within it, even as its loading screen begs me to appreciate the vistas of its hallways and listen to its soundtrack with headphones. Why does it do that? Why is it so desperate for me to think of it as art?

Because it is not. It just fucking isn’t. Artists worked on this, but this is not art. This is not even video game as product. This is not even video game mechanic as health insurance website design. This is a concentrated psychological attack. It has many beautiful elements to it wrapped up in an IP that begs you to think about the interestingness of its ideas more than its content, begging you to find value in what it has to offer as well. All a trick, a ruse, to get you nice and inoculated to being dead inside to get stuck in its number go up factory work.

I can see the thread for how investment happens. The visuals for walking through the hallways are interesting enough you want to keep going. The stories are delivered piece meal, so you might as well see what the next section looks like. The combat doesn’t require much mental effort, so you might as well grind for a bit. Any individual element sucks, like really sucks, but not in a way that hurts, that causes pain. So if you’re used to getting something out of one of the forms of engagement being teased here, you press on. And then you’ve made a habit, and then you’ve learned some of how the loop works, and then you get curious what kinds of side quests you could do, because you want some control over this experience again. And choosing to do a side quest over a main quest is really the most purposeful engagement you could hope to get out of this app. And then there are enough resources and numbers to manage with art that’s just pretty enough to look at that it keeps on happening.

I hated Cats & Soup and thought it was evil, but I could get it. I could have sympathy for the societal forces that could make one want to give that game some time. But this one? Naw. Playing this game, loving this game, you have been hacked. I want to give you hugs and milk and cookies and a 3DS and / or PS Vita so you know there are good things in life.

If anyone defends this game because it has Lore™ pertaining to the DrakeNieR universe I am going to implode.

Justice for All como sequência traz mecânicas que melhoram a narrativa de investigação, como apresentar perfis dos personagens, deixando separado das evidências, deixando bem menos complicado apresentação de alguns fatos nos casos e psy lockers que deixam a seção de investigação mais envolvente e instigante.

Em relação a história, maioria dos casos tem uma história mais fraca que anterior, talvez ainda com problema de ritmo durante as investigações que pode deixar um tanto chato,porém ultimo além de ser possivelmente o melhor caso entre os dois, a narrativa do jogo ainda trás um desenvolvimento muito bom pra todos personagens, principalmente pro protagonista.

Gostei bastante dos novos personagens, adições de gameplay e da história no geral, é uma introdução que não esquece o que faz um Gears ser Gears. Coop brabo mais uma vez, do tipo que você joga horas e nem percebe.

Ah, e com certeza é um dos jogos mais bonitos do Xbox One.




Evolução natural que se espera de uma sequência em relação a gameplay, com pequenos ajustes e adições.

A história aqui também é bem mais interessante devido a adição de um certo personagem. O level design recebeu um baita upgrade, nada de sensação de andar em círculos igual ao primeiro jogo.

Ah, e as cutscenes refeitas são sacanagem, é de cair o queixo de tão bonito.

O que resta? "Finalizar esta luta"

this gotta be the worst title for any game ever. why is the emphasis added on how high tech this world is when if anything the world's pretty low tech by this series standards. why isnt it just alex kidd in high tech world, why the colon. perhaps the lack of the word in was a covert way of telling us that this aint a real alex kidd game and i played it for nothing

Furi

2016

When you think about bosses in video games, and you think about how video games translate to other mediums, bosses are one of those abstract elements that get confusing in translation. A boss, would presumably be some kind of side villain or obstacle on the journey to the destination in another story, but of course video games supplement you with way more than just one side antagonist or so usually. The dissonance here is that usually an antagonist of any kind is expected to have some kind of prominence, or power, or at the very least personality. They need to serve a purpose, and serve it well, and it's arguable video game bosses don't succeed at this. Rarely do they really activate the sensation you're "fighting" so much as the sensation you're just going through clear-cut scripted motions to get through them. Most bosses are sub-par, basically. Often they're only stressing one element and not the most important factors of being an engaging combatant; even in the best boss-driven games. Furi's success is completely natural then, because it's a neon anime-fight lightshow. You'd be struggling to convey how it blends genre but saying "it's how a kid imagines a swordfight" might just sum it up best. Flashy, snappy, fast-paced and constantly changing perspective, aggressor and methodology of attack. Jumping from swarms of bullets to rapid-fire melee quick-time events works out perfectly thanks to the general aesthetic and flow that makes it all feel natural. Bosses have linear phases, but they still move quite freely around the arena usually, and, using some tension built up during the fight, contextualize all their actual scripted phases perfectly. If anything, Furi should tell you that every game from now on focused around bosses should strive for these kinds of multi-phased monsters, and we should've known it since Seven Force. What Furi might not be able to tell other games is to match its exceedingly strong degree of variety per-fight that sees you seamlessly jumping between everything cool in the book, which helps further differentiate every (already solid) phase of every (already solid) boss.

If you've ever felt disenchanted by the lackluster and untense sameyness and structure of boss fights in even the greatest of action games, then Furi is waiting for you with open arms.

Hollow Knight is one of the greatest metroidvanias of all-time. Getting lost in this beautiful world and slowly unravelling the mysteries of Hallownest’s past made me want to never stop exploring. The score and art really elevate the beauty of this game. From the dreary and terrifying depths, to the melancholic and pensive city of tears; each and every area has its own unique and different feel. Finding a new ability or charm is always around the corner and by the end of the game you feel like an absolute beast. Everything from the movement to the combat is so buttery smooth and it makes fighting the endless supply of amazing bosses such a blast. Once you figure out their patterns it’s like an elegant dance between the two of you. This game is incredible and I cannot rave about this game enough. The fact that this game was made by THREE people is beyond impressive. Play this game.

Silksong, I don’t know if you even exist, but I am ready.

you might be asking yourself “falco umhhhhh that's not … that's not a 4.5 game right there” ok and you know what shut the fuck up I'm the only one with the universal jurisdiction to say if a game should deserve this high a praise and i can tell you with absolute honesty that ive never had such an experience in gaming industry that stimulated every single sense of my body and brain in more than one way possible and just for that this deserves to be in the top of everything i love about videogames fun gameplay lovely art and music and gay sex cue the usual disclaimer

ALERT THIS IS A GAY PORN GAME ! which means I will be talking about my private time experiences with the material and the licentious content of this game that might hurt your over religious conservative puritan homophobic beliefs or maybe you just dont want to read about what turns me on and I don't fucking care you've been advised

paradiso guardian was a project that i saw roaming around during the last years and i was pretty sure nothing wouldve come out of it i thought it was just a cute experiment that would never see the light of day well im happy to say that team level something released this gem of a game just so that i would look like a fool and also jerk off

those who know me in the audience are well aware that symphony of the night is one of my favorite games ever created in this world absolutely such an incredible work of art that i will never get tired of playing and replaying literally it has everything a masterpiece has to offer and also boom sexy alucard

so then bussy guardian follows closely the example of the greatest blueprint of the metroidvania genre and aims to create a tribute for symphony of the night that could rival to one of the most influential games ever created and im glad to say that they came damn close and when you think about it without the gay porn stuff paradiso guardian is an incredibly novel concept all the aspects in this game are brimming with professionality and im glad it came out as good as it did

lead twunk lenga is a colorful angel residing in heaven which is actually getting ravished by loads and loads of demons and penetrated until the seams start to fall apart im still talking about heaven not about lenga keep up SO the guy being a sweet little guardian angel goes on a mission to actually track down the culprit of the invasion that is destroying the paradiso and to fuck him up . pretty simple but a good enough setup for whats to cum

as i was saying this is heavily inspired by sotn and i was definitely not expecting for the developers to not only follow closely almost every single element of castlevanias masterpiece but also actually managed to create an experience that feels almost if not identical to the former for starters lenga albeit quite stiffer than the blonde vampire but its still such a joy to move around and while theres not as many movement options its still pretty fun to run around the “castle” in this case

gameplay wise this is also pretty similar and competent you got the usual equipments and items with different battle styles then you got the usual skills but with a twist because you dont have to use fucking fighting games combos to activate (dont @ me i love those in sotn but im glad they didnt put it here even though theres a scroll that can activate those kind of skills but im too poor to buy it sorryyyyyyyyyyy) and some summons it's pretty varied I gotta say even If obviously derivative but it IS a tribute game

I genuinely didn't think this could be that good because since this is an hybrid porn game i 100% thought the metroidvania aspect was gonna be half jank but its so fucking GOOD for no absolute reason every single place of the castle is full of interesting monster designs some bomb ass segments a fluid gameflow and the slowmo duck ability was goated I had a lot of fun even though the game isn't that long most of it I actually completed in mayyyyyybe 5 hours ??? theres a lot of stuff to discover battle tactics to use get lost in the castle again and again and again basically every single metroidvania element is present and thriving and im here for it

for a good chunk of the game I was so impressed that they managed to recreate the sotn feeling not only in the gameplay department but also the art style which is literally so close to the sotn one it could be a dlc from that game every single sprite is moving so flawlessly monsters backgrounds castle pieces bosses everything has such a good fucking spritework that is just a joy to witness and in general I did not think the whole castle could be characterised so well even though theres like 4 different areas it's absolutely insane godlike work

and for some reason the music is also pretty grand AND emulating the neoclassic darkwave or whatever the fuck the name of sotn music genre is and BRIMMING with details it sounds like a fucking live orchestra and thats something I felt last time only in castlevania it's insane the lengths this team went to get to the players the tribute they wanted and there's a lot of different tunes that are ALL . SO . FUCKING . GOOD and my absolute favorite one of the bunch is of course club moment

do you know when that plays . exactly when lenga is getting FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKED

so let's talk about the MEAT of the game right now I tried to be as safe for work as possible for straightos stumbling here but that is no more

during lengas ascent in heaven to find and fuck the big bad up theres gonna be a lot of different people trying to get in lengas way which could be some friends trying to stop him from doing something dangerous of full on enemies and what happens is that lenga is a fucking nymphomaniac and every single boss beaten is gonna get a damn huge crush on him and fucking him up as they should

so what happens is you get into a boss battle you beat the boss and lenga proceeds to slurp their meat up until they cum and go back to the headquarters of paradiso waiting for another chance to get a 1 on 1 with lenga

at this point you can get into the headquarters and offer the different men some gifts so that you're gonna strengthen their bond until you unlock some difficult challenges to replay the boss battles

want to know what happens after you beat these battles ??? that's right you get a special skill im joking yes you get a special skill but you also get a damn good fucking back to back to back

so I'll be direct I beat my meat off at least 50 times on these cgs my dick started aching after a while because I would just be beating it all the fucking time I'm not joking these CGs are incredible the different character portraits are already a damn joy to look at every single character is hunky as shit super sexy and has so much beef that would fill an entire butchery but the SEX SCEEEEENEEEES OOOOOOH THE SEX SCENES are some of the best I've ever had the pleasure to masterbate to

for starters the voice acting of this game is absolutely unbelievable every single character is not only thriving with personality but the sex scenes have so much moaning and gasping and dirty words that I ended up cumming in like 10 seconds every time absolutely insane AND the artist has a damn good understanding of what makes anime CGs so exotic theres a lot of different positions and camera angles incredible situations and masterful pornographic writing I bet every single gay guy or gay porn connoisseur would just be thriving with this game I'm not joking

so there's 4 different main guys in the pool floody is the childhood friend archetype big beefy guy cannon in hand another cannon in his pants has a really great perverted bottom / shy top dynamic with lenga and while not my favorite guy of the bunch I probably ended up enjoying his CGs set the most (probably because he's always on the giving side and I love seeing lenga take a huge fat cock and moaning maybe im biased) and in general floody is so fucking hot definitely a good time then you have the oni prince shuten who instead has the “I want him as my wife” simp dynamic which I'm not usually a huge fan of but he's pretty hot to begin with so there's a lot to love in his sets and seeing lenga actually switch was a fun time then you got vitos who instead is a demon that ends up eating lenga inside out he's also pretty great not my favorite CG set of the bunch but he's pretty hot and for that I gotta respect him and anD AND THEN MY FAVORITE BOO RADIAN UGHHHHHH so if you know me irl you know im a huge fan of daddies and radian is absolutely . fucking . hot plus the dad x son (NOT RELATED BY BLOOD !!!) dynamic here makes me so fucking horny you guys won't believe what was going through my mind during those scenes anyway again this is not my favorite CG set of the bunch but radian is the hottest guy in the entire game and the last scene with him was probably my most fapped to of the bunch so so so so gorgeous

that to say if you want a lot of jerking off material you're looking at the perfect game

now you would think lenga would stop here but he goes to the extent to fucking or get fucked by not only guest bosses that can be summoned but also the god of thunder which is among my favorite scenes of the game literally replayed also this one so many times you couldve donated 50 gallons of sperm im not joking here absolutely hot hottie hottest hunk of a thunder deity I want to be dominated by him if it's the last thing I do in this life and lenga also goes to the extend of doing a SPOILER huge fucking orgy with the entire cast AND the final boss ??? (who's also a snack unfortunately you only get one scene with him)

I love this lewd angel with my entire being I relate to him I wouldve done the same with so many hunks around me

so anyway I lost the point what did I want to say oh yeah this game is incredible absolutely fucking jawdropping I love a game that makes me stress on boss battles and makes me relieve that stress after the boss battles hand free incredible what other games does that ???

this is not a perfect game and it doesn't deserve the 4.5 rating but I'm literally the target audience for this game so if I'm not the one giving this a bloated rating who is gonna do that if even a single person reading this is gonna jerk off to this game think about me while you do that I'm gonna grow more powerful

so there's that thank you for reading another infodump about my sexual experiences foe whoevers interested I got the save files with everything unlocked and 100%ed so that you can instantly look at the gallery and jerk off im not gonna delete the game files until I'm tired of doing onanism on these CGs so yeah

umhhhhhh the end I guess see you at the next gay porn game probably coming out on top because I'm playing that rn

There currently is only a demo, but from what I've played, it has a lot of potential to become a great game. I can't wait to see what the story mode is like.
(BTW the demo is on Steam)

Maybe, only maybe, after all said and done, I got rhythm after all...

I did feel a bit nervous going into Hi Fi Rush, because even tho I’m not hesitant to show my love and appreciation for the rhythm genre, that doesn’t change the reality that is the fact I’m complete ass at them, so when mixing that with a 3D beat ‘em up combat style which, wouldn’t you know, I usually suck balls at too, then I was scared I’d be facing a doom or gloom situation. Either it all clicked, or I failed to catch its drift and begin to even enjoy it, I only saw those two possibilities and was really scared of the latter. I really wanted to love it, I really wanted to enjoy what seemed like a game made from sheer love and passion for the craft, and the prospect of not ‘’getting it’’ felt like some sort of looming threat over my head... Only now after beating it I realize that, even if that were to be the case, it wouldn’t change my feelings about any other aspect.

There’s so much to enjoy in and about Hi Fi Rush that I don’t really know where to start with; perhaps I could (and will) begin by praising the outstanding visual style, a wonderful mixture of colors and design that made me reminisce of the kind of futuristic punk seen in games like Jet Set Radio or even deBlob, with the difference being that the Vandelay campus doesn't hold back when it comes to being stylish. The corporation may be rotten, but fuck man, whoever oversees decorations needs a raise! Everything pops up with the beautiful cel shading that made me feel like I was playing through a moving comic book at times; seeing cinematics flow together into and after gameplay was a mastery of transition I was not expecting to witness, and how in it to its entirely dances to the rhythm in such a satisfying way.

I could (and will) also gush about the characters; the crew of Chai, Peppermint, Macaron and the rest of the gang with is hunger inducing names is a set of characters I really, REALLY wasn’t expecting to be so fond of, and hey, it’s nice to see a main character I can relate to... a complete idiot! I say that, but Chai manages to walk in the fine line that its between being lovably cocky and completely insufferable and coming out positively from it, and for such a simple and free of conflict narrative, it still manages to give him and the rest some incredibly impactful moments. Hi Fi Rush strays away for what I thought would be predictable plot points and instead tales a relatively simple tale with the perfect cast of goofballs, to the point I found myself wishing to see a little bit more or Peppermint’s struggles, more of Macaron’s character wise in general or that CNMN had more stuff to do ‘cause holy hell I love that fact spitting metal head so much (tho he gets the single best most surprising moment in the game so hey, you lose some you win some!). The villains are also a home run, never mind this game’s whole plot is about defeating dastardly suits — I’ve always wanted to bash a cybernetic CEO’s hed with a guitar!— but they are all so into being the specific trope or character they are going for that it’s impossible to not love to hate them, and honestly the big bad ends up being a bit boring personality wise compared to the rest of them (tho now that I think about, that was the intent, in which case it’d be pretty fitting to be completely honest), because they really are a riot.

Tho the funny factor isn’t limited to the big bads. There are so many jokes and gags that and that I feel like I’m watching an airport; whether it’s just the energy that the characters interactions ooze or simply the way they act between each other, Chais’ stupidity at the beginning (seriously I was laughing my ass off during that dream sequence), the way not just the main villains but the damn normal enemies are introduced and how you can discover that NONE of them were originally designed for combat despite being literal killing machines, or just incredibly funny moments like finding a random log of a disgruntled employee that decided to mess the coffee machine firmware, and for that to be a recurring joke THROUGH THE ENTIRE ADVENTURE, that, that right there, and I don’t use this word lightly (or use it in general for that matter), is PEAK humor. And what’s this? Very spaced use and references to memes that actually work as jokes in the moment and aren’t recent??? Hi Fi Rush, if you wanted my heart, you just had to ask!

Even if you think you know what you are getting yourself into, Hi Fi Rush always finds ways to surprise you. When you think you got this game nailed and it’s just combat sections between platforming and exploration zones then BAM!, it hits you with a new idea, a new enemy that introduces a new design, a new boss fight that completely changes how you approach combat, a new partner, a new cool moment, spaced perfectly between each other so they don’t grow tiring while close enough to keep you engaged. It never presents you with never seen before ideas, but it always finds ways to create jaw-dropping situations and mix and match concepts to create something that feels new, a sort of ‘’yoink and twist’’, if you will. There’s a never-ending feeling of ‘’wholeness’’ in this game, where everything works incredibly well when looked independently, but also as whole; it’s hard to not notice how much the game’s systems and ideas sip into one another and some things wouldn’t hit as hard if there wasn’t te other, like the music! It sounds good, they are fantastic tunes, but something is missing from them in re-listens, even the licensed ones... it misses the ASS-WHOOPING!

Seeing so many accessibility options calmed me down quite a bit when I started, but after a while, after playing and beginning the fights and the dance of combat... I was getting it! Not because I was good, oh no, my tempo is still very much far from perfect, and yet, I was getting it. The music began to flow through the sounds of fight and diging, the enemies attacking with the music the same you do, hitting the right times as well as dancing, it was a slow dance at first, but by the half-way point, I wasn’t going along the music, it felt as if I was making it through fighting alone. The new moves you get, the special attacks and interactions of your partners (which also make for some extremely fun platforming challenges) and upgrades nudge little by little, they compel you to be more daring, to dance faster, to be more aggressive, to know where to defend, to dodge and parry through your riffs and hits. Failing is part of the process in a way, it’s still really hard to get a perfect or even high rhythm score at first, and yet it’s fun, it made me want to keep trying, to be a rockstar.

It’s like a story or battle you’d imagine while listening to an intense rock song, only made into a 10-hour game full dream-like joy, and even beyond that thanks to the meaty post-game and incredibly fun side modes. An adventure with so many things to love that I even at this point in the review I wonder if was truly able to express them fully, Hi Fi Rus is a simple game in theory, but in practice is a wonderful, beautiful and funny odyssey, always hopeful and excited to keep going even when facing the clear dangers of such a conglomerate, always finding ways to surprise, to be welcoming, to make you feel like you got rhythm indeed. I know that many couldn't get into it even with the extra help, and I totally get it, it’s still a game that might reject you simply because it’s combat system is not fun or doesn’t click, that makes sense and I’m happy you at least gave it a go, but if you still haven’t, I implore you to give it a try, and even if you don’t jam with its battle system, who knows, you might find something else to adore about it...

Moral of the story? Finances are cringe, lesbians always win, Deemon can’t parry and 808 is best cat, that adorable (goof)ball is so precious...